


On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages (Part 8 - Transgender Telepaths)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [157]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Artificial Insemination, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, LGBT, Psi Corps, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:47:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22947283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: The eighth part of a comprehensive essay on marriage (and reproduction) in the Corps.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!
Series: Behind the Gloves [157]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/677654
Comments: 10
Kudos: 4





	On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages (Part 8 - Transgender Telepaths)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

Part 1 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14408412). Summary of Part 1: Arranged marriages in the Corps are not what you think, are not as common as you think, always involve consenting adults, and no one is _forced_ to marry or breed.

Part 2 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14539404). Summary of Part 2: Policies of genetic matching in the Corps were developed, in a "big picture" sense, to help protect Earth from future Shadow invasion. Most telepaths don't know about this, however, and so to them, these practices exist as part of a century of tradition, culture, and values.

Part 3 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544210). Summary of Part 3: Arranged marriages started in the MRA, under Crawford. They began as yet another policy by which normals attempted to make telepaths into a separate, subservient caste.

Part 4 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544645). Summary of Part 4: Vacit promoted and streamlined the arranged marriage/marriage approval system, and created the genealogy department, in order to promote telepath population growth and telepathic strength, and thus to protect Earth from the Shadows. This department can approve or deny marriages, but does not actually arrange them.

Part 5 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14550252). Summary of Part 5: Arranged marriages are a part of tight-knit telepath culture. (The essay focuses on the background to Bester's arranged marriage.)

Part 6 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14551104): Summary of Part 6: Students are prohibited from having sexual relationships while still in school, at least on paper (until graduation, until age 18 by normal age reckoning). They aren't fixed up with arranged marriages while in school - when this happens, it only happens later.

Part 7 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14555994). Summary of Part 7: The Corps doesn't care the sex of the person you marry. They only care that telepaths have children, naturally or through IVF, and there are internal rules about what they can ask of people.

\-----

Thanks to reader Maeve_McKinnon for bringing this up!

I want to write a longer story that deal with this, once I figure out how to make it work. In the meantime, I will say that the Corps (as an institution) doesn't care about the sex of the person you marry, or your own sex/gender, either. The wrinkles come up only around reproduction.

  * If someone was unmarried and had no children already, the Corps might ask for sperm/eggs first.



For sperm donation, I don't see why it would be treated any differently than the (very common) case of cis men donating sperm and then not marrying/not remarrying. (See for instance, Sandoval Bey, who implies he has done exactly this, and never even met the children.) The only difficulty here would be whether someone would be allowed to block male puberty and transition younger - not because they have anything ideologically against LGBT people, but because then you couldn't have biological children. Canon obviously never gets into one of these cases, but that would be the issue for some people (because of family lineages, because people want to try for children who are stronger than they are, etc.).

But I don't mean it's an absolute ban - there are plenty of unmarried telepaths who don't have children (see, for instance, both Talia and Lyta - Lyta was never married, and Talia had her short marriage annulled, and canon makes no mention at all of the Corps ever trying to get them remarried or either of them ever having children). John Matheson in Crusade is another example - unmarried, no children. So is Byron Gordon! And Bester's lover never lives to give birth, so I think that means we never meet a single telepath in the show who has had children. **_Not one._**

There is no "rule" that all telepaths must be "forced" to have children, or even that all unmarried telepaths be "forced" to have children, or that anyone be "forced" to marry to have children. It's a social matter - and with such things, YMMV - not rules or regulations. It's _far worse_ to have a telepath child commit suicide than for that child not to have children him/herself.

Again, as I've said like, everywhere, the Corps is made up of _people_ ; it's not some monolithic faceless bureaucracy controlling people's lives. There is no "one way" these aspects of people's lives play out.

For egg donation, there is the additional wrinkle of who would carry the child - but that's not insurmountable, because I'm sure somewhere in the Corps there are women who would be willing to bear additional children to help other telepaths out (especially Corps-raised women, because they would have been raised to very strongly see the Corps as a family). Remember, this is a culture where it is **_very common_** for cis women to undergo IVF and carry the child of someone they barely know.

This would be a lot more obvious if we had canon books written from the POV of telepath women, and if the show didn't focus on life on a space station, where no one has children - normals or telepaths - because everyone's living on this space station (spinning in circles, around and around, till they think they're standing still, and the entire universe revolves around them).

OK, we're not there yet. ^_^

And that's where it all lands - freezing/donating eggs is a _pain in the ass_ (I've been there, done that IRL), but it's just one's _duty_ , and that's it. If you want to do that because you go on dangerous missions and might not survive, OK. If you want to do that because you want to transition, OK. No one is ever going to link this to cultural notions of "motherhood" (which I guess is also weird for normals, who expect no connection to "fatherhood" in sperm donation, but think of egg freezing differently).

The usual conflicts between the expectations of "laters" and those of Corps-raised telepaths is the larger issue - laters are generally heartbroken at not being able to raise their own children beyond the age of five (and usually three), while to Corps-raised telepaths, this unusual system is their "normal" (in the sense of "regular" and "ordinary" and "how it should be," not "normals"!).


End file.
